


Jabberwocky

by mizael



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Childhood Friends, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 09:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15240831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizael/pseuds/mizael
Summary: The boy shifted and tried to look up at him, but Ryouken panicked and immediately covered his eyes.“You can’t,” he said, quickly. “If you look at me you’ll turn to stone.”“Oh.”





	Jabberwocky

**Author's Note:**

> i want to die this fic took an entire month to write and i scrapped like 389434 versions of this before this one... at one point it was a youkai au. now it's not.......  
> anyway thanks to [driftingstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/driftingstar/) for dealing with me as i wrote this bc i screamed a couple times on discord
> 
> [inspiration song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXB2tFFYr58)

On Ryouken’s eighth birthday, a boy showed up on his doorstep.

His cheeks were hollow and his skin stuck to his bones like stretched fabric over a skeleton frame, drooping, as if he hadn’t eaten in years. He was shivering from the ocean breeze too, a cold wreck with clattering teeth and goosebumps along his skin, and looked so miserable that Ryouken immediately felt sick. It was like looking at a walking corpse.

He was a child back then, a little too innocent and naive to wonder why someone like this could have ended up in front of his door, why this child looked the way he did, what he came from, what his intentions were.

All Ryouken remembers is wondering if he could help.

The boy shifted and tried to look up at him, but Ryouken panicked and immediately covered his eyes. He pressed his hand forcefully against his face.

“You can’t,” he said, quickly. “If you look at me you’ll turn to stone.”

“Oh.”

Ryouken knew none of the other village kids ever dared to come up the cliff, too scared of the tales of vicious gorgons and insatiable monsters that would either devour them whole or turn them into stone. Or maybe both. Sometimes a kid would be dared to knock on his door only to immediately leave, too frightened to look at him when he opens it.

It was rare to have anyone who stayed, to keep him company atop that cliff overlooking the ocean.

“I have food,” Ryouken offered, hopeful. “You can have some of it.”

The boy twitched beneath his hands.

“... Please.”

He led the boy inside carefully, with small steps, and gripped him by the shoulders to push him forward so that he would never look back at Ryouken. He sat the boy at the table and then went to fetch a few pieces of jerky and vegetables they had in their kitchen. Ryouken didn’t know how to cook, but he at least knew which ones could be eaten raw and which ones couldn’t. He placed all of them on the table.

The boy only gave a small glance at the pile of food, but didn’t look at the collection for long, just reached his hand out and ate as if he would never eat again, shoveling food into his mouth as if he were going to run off with it. Ryouken only watched in morbid fascination.

He wondered what happened to the boy, to be so thin and starved. Whenever he grew hungry, he just asked his father, or else looked in their larder for something to eat. Did this boy not have that?

The sound of sniffling brought him back from his thoughts. Ryouken belatedly realized the boy was crying.

“Does it taste bad?” he asked, panicked.

“No!” the boy immediately said and shook his head. “No, it’s really good! I just haven’t… haven’t…”

He started crying harder and Ryouken rushed over. He didn’t know what to do—he remembered that whenever he cried, his father rubbed circles into his back. Ryouken tried to do the same for him, unsure of what else he could do. The boy kept crying and crying.

“Hey,” Ryouken said, softly. He tried not to scare him. “What’s wrong?”

The boy just sniffled. Ryouken felt bad.

“Um, whenever I’m sad—“ Ryouken started, then stopped. He tried to think of his words carefully. “Whenever I’m sad, I just think of three things that make me happy. I-If that helps.”

“Make you happy?” the boy asked, hesitant.

Ryouken nodded, glad that the boy finally responded. “Yeah, three things. Can you think of any right now?”

The boy grew silent for a long moment and Ryouken bit his lip. It was taking almost a little too long for the boy to think of anything. Surely he had three things that made him happy? Three easy things like food or his parents?

“I can only think of two…” the boy said a little while later. “Um… the food is very delicious… and I’m glad I ended up here.”

“Really?” Ryouken broke into a small smile. “You’re not scared of me?”

“You gave me food… and it’s okay as long as I don’t look at you, right?”

“Yeah, yeah! Oh, I know! I have a third thing for you.”

The boy turned his head around on reflex, and Ryouken covered his eyes again. He felt the puff of air behind his hand as the boy realized what had just happened—and so soon after, too.

Instead, the boy continued on, curious. “What is it? The third thing.”

Ryouken felt his smile grow wider. “I’m glad you ended up here too.”

The boy’s hesitant smile was warm against his hand, and Ryouken laughed a little bit as it tickled his palm. The boy laughed with him.

Soon after, Ryouken packed what other vegetables and food he could into a small bag and handed it over to the boy, and wished him a safe journey home. He couldn’t see the boy’s expression because he was faced away from Ryouken, but the fingers that gripped the bag tightened.

“Thank you,” he said.

And just like that, he left.

 

 

Ryouken spent long days afterward gazing out the windows of his house, waiting for the boy to come back. Sometimes the rustle of a bush nearby would catch his attention, or another village kid would come to knock on his door then leave. Throughout all this, he stayed diligent near the window, peeking out from behind the curtains that his father warned him must always be closed.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, until one day he heard the front door open again.

What came back wasn’t the boy, but his father. Kougami Kiyoshi stumbled back into the house and Ryouken rushed to greet him, but.

What came back wasn’t his father, either.

He had bags under his eyes, wrinkles on his skin, and the beginning of white hair on his head, like he had aged ten years in the past ten months that Ryouken hadn’t seen him. Or perhaps time had passed faster than Ryouken thought it had—it was always this way, after all. He perceived time differently than humans.

His mother was a beautiful woman who thrived in the sea, her voice so lovely that sailors would run their ships into the rocks for her. But she was no siren; she just pretended like she was one, because she hated what she was.

Ryouken always thought his mother was beautiful, even the snakes that spilled from her head like hair, each one of them with scales so bright it looked like they blinded mortals rather than turn them to stone. He remembered the way they used to rub against his cheeks, flit their tongues along his forehead like they were trying to kiss him goodnight.

When his mother saw that his hair did not become snakes like hers, she threw herself at him and wept.

“Oh thank you, thank you,” she sobbed, her hands tight on his shoulders. “Thank you gods, for not making him like me.”

He didn’t understand back then; he had wanted her snakes too, but she told him that he was lucky. Ryouken looked human in every sense of the word.

“Your eyes are like the ocean,” she told him later, soft and fond, her hand on his cheek. The snakes hissed softly against his skin. “What a wonderful thing. To be able to see each other… to look into your eyes…”

They could only look at each other in that space; his father was, for all his genius, a mortal, and could not even look at his own wife and son. Ryouken averted his eyes too whenever his father came, lest he turn to stone.

Kougami Kiyoshi closed his eyes and reached out blindly. Ryouken immediately took his hand.

“Welcome home,” he greeted, eyes shining. It had been too long since his father had last come home. Perhaps he traveled farther this time; maybe he even has stories to share. There was precious little that he knew about the world outside of this cliff, all of them told to him in stories by his father, confined to the house as he is.

Ryouken gripped his father’s hand tightly and swung it around, smiling. “Where did you go? What did you do? What was it like?”

“Ryouken…” his father’s voice was tired beyond all belief. Ryouken stopped his questions immediately.

“I’m sorry father,” he said quietly and looked down at his feet. “I know you want to rest.”

“Rest…” Kougami Kiyoshi sighed deeply. “Yes, I am tired. Help me to my bed, Ryouken.”

“Of course, father.”

Ryouken led his father by the hand to his barely used room, as he came home sparingly. Ryouken, though, had been diligent in cleaning it so there would be no dust in sight when his father returned from his long trips and needed to use it. His father merely smiled at the sight and patted his head, keeping his eyes firmly focused on the room in front of him.

“Thank you, Ryouken,” he said.

“It’s no problem!” Ryouken beamed. “You can tell me about everything tomorrow! And I can tell you something too—I made a friend!”

“A friend?” his father stilled. “What kind of friend?”

“He was my age, I think,” Ryouken excitedly said. “He was really thin but I gave him some food. He said he wasn’t scared of me at all!”

“I see…” his father’s voice was distant, but Ryouken ignored it. “What was his name?”

“Oh—um…” Ryouken stopped, brows furrowed. He pursed his lips. “I… I never asked… I forgot…”

His father laughed lightly and ruffled his head. “You will have next time.”

“Yeah!”

For a few moments afterward, there was silence, then his father turned his head to look at him and Ryouken covered his own eyes on reflex.

There was a small shuffling noise.

“Ryouken…” his father’s hands gripped his shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Ryouken asked underneath the hands covering his face (and more specifically, his eyes).

“For never being here,” his father said, his voice solemn and sad. Ryouken never wanted to hear his father this way. “When you needed it most, when your mother died…”

“Father…?”

“I have travelled far and wide and sought help from the gods but it’s not possible,” his father was rambling now, his fingers digging into Ryouken’s shoulders. He didn’t protest.

“What isn’t possible?”

“I can’t cure you of your gorgon half,” his father’s voice cracked and Ryouken felt his whole body freeze in an instant, like he was going into shock. “Tomorrow… tomorrow, I must apologize to your mother.”

Ryouken stayed silent.

“What color are your eyes, Ryouken?” his father asked suddenly.

“Mother said they were like the ocean.”

“I see,” the hands left his shoulder and he heard his father stand up. Ryouken peeked out from behind his hands and saw his father moving towards the bed, his movements slow and heavy. “You must have your mother’s eyes… I don’t have blue eyes.”

“Do you need anything else, father?” Ryouken asked slowly. He was thinking about his father’s words— _curing his gorgon half._

Why?

Was it so shameful that it was something to be cured? Was it why his father ordered him to stay away from the village children and never leave the house?

Deep down inside, he must have already knew, because the news made him—some part of him—sad. Yet the other side didn’t know how to feel. His gorgon half was the only thing he had left of his mother, before she was tossed into the waves and the ocean swallowed her whole.

But if he was cured, he could look at his father’s face instead of his back, and… and that boy, too. Ryouken never saw his face either, just the back of his head and his navy and pink colored hair.

“No,” his father said and laid down. “Let us get up early tomorrow and go to see your mother. Good night, Ryouken.”

“Good night, father.”

When Kougami Kiyoshi laid down that night and fell asleep, he did not wake up again.

 

 

Ryouken could still remember the day his mother died.

The villagers came up the cliff with swords and harpoons, rallied to action by fear and rumors, the two deadliest things a human could wield. When his mother saw them climb the hill, she only laughed bitterly and held him close.

“They have finally come,” she said. The snakes on her head were still that day. “I always knew they would. I just wondered which day… when…”

“Mother?”

“I love you, Ryouken,” she continued, and pushed his head into her collar. Her embrace was warm, but she was shaking. “Today is the day… it’s…”

“Mother…?”

“I’m so glad you look human, Ryouken,” she buried her face in his hair and wept like she did before. “They will spare you. But if I leave and they can’t find a monster, then they won’t. They’ll come for you, then. And no matter how far we run they would always come after us.”

“Who? Who will come after us?” Ryouken’s voice rose increasingly in panic. Why was his mother crying? Why was she talking about leaving?

“I can’t do that to you. I have to stay. I wish I could stay longer.”

“Stay!” Ryouken gripped his mother’s arms. For some reason, even though she was talking about staying, he felt scared. He felt as if he wouldn’t see her again. “Mother!”

She locked him inside the house and left, to confront the villagers who had made it up the hill.

That day, they cut her head off of her body and Ryouken watched all of the snakes on her scalp go limp, dangling like pretty jewelry instead of the live creatures he always saw them as. Then, they threw her body off the cliff and burned her head.

Ryouken could still remember the sound of the splash on the ocean’s surface, the crackling of the fire, the village’s sighed relief.

He ran to the cliff after they left and gazed out over the ocean. It sparkled brilliantly like he had never seen before, bioluminescent and beautiful. Stardust Road, his mother called it.

A road for his mother to return home, he thought, because she was always with the ocean.

Ryouken sat and cried.

And cried and cried.

His father came home to a quiet house and quieter son.

 

 

He buried his father in the ocean like they had done for his mother. Ryouken dragged his body down to the beach and let the waves carry him off the shore. He had wanted to open his father’s eyes—one last time, to see the color, to wonder.

But if the dead became statues too, his father would sink before he could even leave the coast.

Ryouken merely watched as the ocean took him away, going a short distance into the horizon before his body sunk.

“Farewell,” he said, to his father, to his mother.

 

 

The years afterward passed by in a blur. Ryouken’s jaw sharpened, his torso lengthened, his legs stretched, and his entire body grew. The snakes did not come from his head and showed no signs of doing so, but patches of white scales that faded into human skin began to show on his face and all over his body instead.

He would look at himself in the mirror each morning and touch the patches of scales; they felt more like snakeskin than flesh.

His body went through a myriad of changes the more the years went by, and showed more of his gorgon half as it mixed with his human half. His mother’s wishes that he looked as human as possible—passable, maybe, if Ryouken covered the scale patches adorning his face and arms (and the rest of his body). It cemented in him the knowledge that he truly was not human, and never could be. And now he could not pass for one without covering himself.

But Ryouken _himself_ also changed along with his body: his smiles turned into scowls, his round eyes became sharp.

And he forgot—about the boy, about his navy and pink hair, about how he wasn’t afraid to interact with Ryouken. Things like that were to be left in the past, sunk like his father’s body in the ocean and burned like his mother’s head.

The boy must have grown older by now, must have realized what Ryouken was and that’s why he never came back.

It was…

_(sad? painful? understandable?)_

It was as it should be.

 

 

On his twentieth birthday, Ryouken found a man on the beach.

He was lying face down in the sand, the ends of his clothes still wet from the ocean water, like he had just drifted ashore as the waves pushed him gently to land. A stray wooden plank laid a few feet away, and as Ryouken followed the trail of broken wood and bent metal, he realized this man must have come from a sunken ship or something similar.

Before Ryouken could turn away, however, the man began to cough and splutter. Ryouken froze, waiting with bated breath as the man pushed himself off of the sand and sat up dazedly, eyes unfocused as he looked everywhere but at Ryouken. Ryouken slapped his palm over his eyes instinctually.

“Where… where am I?” the man asked, voice raspy, probably from the lack of water and growing dehydration.

How long had he been shipwrecked?

“Den Island,” Ryouken replied. “Did your ship sink?”

“We were caught in a storm…” the man coughed. “I fell off. I don’t know where the ship is.”

“There weren’t any storms here last night or the night before,” Ryouken said. His fingers twitched on his face as he tried to cover both his eyes and the patches of scales with one hand. The other hand was trying to cover the scales on his arm. “You must have drifted a long way.”

“Den Island…” the man trailed off. “I was trying to get to Sol Island.”

“That is a long ways from here.”

Before the man could respond, he was racked by another coughing fit. Ryouken peaked through his fingers to see that the man had begun to cough up blood on the sand in place of water as he held his navy hair back. He was dehydrated beyond belief, and Ryouken—

Ryouken could have left him there, if he wanted. There was nothing to gain from humans but heartbreak and despair.

But the colors… the colors tugged at him familiarly, navy and pink along the man’s hair and brighter blue along his bangs. Had Ryouken seen him before? Perhaps even read about him? Saw a painting?

There was nothing that irked Ryouken more than things he did not know, and the mystery of the familiarity was beginning to seep its way into his bones. It clung to him like a child to a security blanket, and Ryouken was reluctant to push it away, if only so he could question the man. Why did it evoke such an emotion within him—the sadness, the melancholy, the _relief?_

“My home is not far,” he didn’t think as he said it, didn’t process that he had offered to let a human into his space voluntarily. The words were out before he could properly register them. “I have water.”

The man twitched on the ground and closed his eyes with a shaky sigh.

“... Please.”

Ryouken led him quietly up the hill and kept his face firmly turned away the entire time, so that the man would not mistakenly look at it. He drew his silken sleeves further down along his arm to cover the scales.

“Thank you,” the man said behind him when they reached his house. His voice was such a soft whisper through the strain of his parched throat that Ryouken had to stop in his tracks fully to hear it.

“It is—”

There was a sound behind him, the sound that clothes make when they are blown harshly in the wind, and then a light _thump_ of something as it hit the ground.

Ryouken spun around to find the man unconscious on the grass.

“It is no problem,” he finished, then sighed.

Ryouken tucked the man between his arms and hauled him inside. He was a lot lighter than he looked, as if he had never had enough to eat.

Some part of him grew sad.

 _If only he came back sooner,_ it said.

Ryouken shook his head and closed the door behind him.

The only bed available in the house that wasn’t Ryouken’s was his father’s. Even all these years after his father passed, Ryouken kept it clean and tidy, free of dust, like he was always waiting for someone to come home and use it. When he first began to clean it again due to habit, he had almost stopped himself.

 _What was the point?_ he thought. _No one is coming home anymore._

Yet he had continued even as the years went on, like it was just another daily task in his routine. This house had always been too big for one person, he reasoned, even if he would never have a guest to use it.

At least, until he hauled the man over his doorstep.

Ryouken fetched a towel from the kitchen and ran it through the water pump. He made sure it sat on the man’s forehead, but unfolded it enough so that it covered his eyes, too. If he woke up while Ryouken was still in the room, it would be hazardous for them both.

Ryouken had no idea how to care for a sick human as he had never been sick himself. Perhaps gorgons just don’t suffer from the same diseases, if they suffered from them at all. Still, the most basic things he knew how to do were to place a towel on the man’s forehead and to have made sure he was warm.

Then he poured water into the man’s mouth until he started coughing and spluttering again.

“Wh-Wha—“

Ryouken pressed his hand firmly against the towel on the man’s head and kept it in place. “Drink.”

Any protests were immediately silenced as the man felt the cup at his lips and opened his mouth. Ryouken opted to tip the cup slowly so that he wouldn’t choke again, but the man’s hands came up to grasp the cup himself and pour more of it down his throat.

When he finished the whole thing, he finally let go.

Ryouken put the cup down, but kept his hand on the towel.

“Thank you,” the man said as he inhaled deeply. His voice was still raspy, but at least it was better than before. “Really.”

Ryouken hummed a response. “What’s your name?”

“It’s… It’s Fujiki Yuusaku,” he said, then frowned. Ryouken felt his eyes move underneath his hands. “Why are you pressing this towel so hard into my face?”

“You can call me Ryouken,” he replied. “You… You can’t look at me.”

“Why?”

“I have a… condition,” Ryouken bit his lip. “No. If you look at me, you will turn to stone.”

Ryouken could see Yuusaku’s mouth move and the word at the end of his tongue before he even said it.

_Gorgon._

“Oh,” Yuusaku breathed, like he was afraid to disturb the atmosphere in the room. That was the emotion that Ryouken knew the most: fear.

“I can fetch you another cup of water,” he said anyway as he made to stand up, voiced strained. “But you must keep the towel on your face. A stray glance is dangerous.”

Yuusaku didn’t reply but moved his hand to replace Ryouken’s as he left. He kept the door open, in case Yuusaku wanted to leave. Ryouken would not blame him, though it would be—

_(sad? lonely? understandable?)_

—expected.

Surprisingly, when Ryouken came back with the cup of water and knocked on the door, a voice greeted him on the other side.

“My eyes are covered,” Yuusaku said in lieu of anything else, like welcome or come in. It was not his house to do so.

Ryouken opened the door and found Yuusaku in the exact same spot and position he had left him in: his right hand held the towel against his face and he was upright on the bed as he held the blanket over him in his left hand. There were still wet stains on his clothes and his skin. Some of the water trails slid further down his chest, and Ryouken stopped his gaze from going further.

“I have water and some leftover soup,” Ryouken said as he held both of the dishes up. “I’ll leave them here so you can eat them by yourself.”

He walked over and set the bowl and cup down on the dresser next to the bed.

_Clink._

“Wait,” Yuusaku said, and Ryouken halted in surprise. “The ship I was on… has anyone seen it around?”

“I haven’t heard of any ships docking here,” Ryouken said, but.

Ryouken had never made his way down the hill to the human village. If a ship came at all, he would have never known.

Yuusaku’s grip on the covers tightened.

“... I can ask,” Ryouken offered.

Yuusaku let go of the sheets.

“That would be… appreciated.”

 

 

Ryouken could not truly ask the locals of the human village himself. If they caught one glimpse of him they would rally to kill him, just like they had his mother. And he could not slip into a disguise, either—the village was a small one, and everyone knew each other. An outsider asking about a ship would be more than suspicious.

He did only what he could do, and that was stand atop the hill every morning to try and spot a passing ship through the morning fog.

The days, however, soon turned to weeks, and the weeks became months.

“I’m sorry,” Ryouken said every morning as he stepped back into his home to find Yuusaku in the foyer expectantly, his eyes closed. “Nothing has showed up.”

“I see,” Yuusaku said, and then turned on his heel to retreat back into the room that Ryouken had lent him. Kougami Kiyoshi’s room.

As the weeks went by, Yuusaku’s demeanor only grew gloomier.

“Would you…” Ryouken hesitantly started, first to break the routine this time, and Yuusaku halted in his tracks. “Would you like something to do?”

“What?” Yuusaku sounded confused.

“You’ve been here a while now,” Ryouken said. “Do you want something to occupy your mind?”

“Am I an inconvenience?” Yuusaku asked.

Ryouken curled his fingers into his sleeves. “No,” he answered quickly. “You just look like you need something to do.”

Yuusaku exhaled softly, and then a long silence followed afterwards, broken only by Yuusaku’s breath.

“The garden could use an extra pair of hands,” Ryouken continued after Yuusaku did not speak up. “Do you know how?”

“I’ve never gardened,” Yuusaku replied.

“I can show you.”

Ryouken turned around to walk out of the house again, then stopped a few paces away and listened.

Yuusaku followed, albeit slowly, like a phantom, his footsteps quiet. Ryouken wished he could see the expression on his face then.

He led them around the house and to the back, to the small garden he tended to because it was his only source of food. The deer and the boars have long since learned to avoid his house. Even the animals knew the danger of a gorgon.

_A half-gorgon._

But why make the distinction? He was gorgon no matter what.

Ryouken knelt down on the dirt and waited for Yuusaku to follow, then reached his hand out to tug on a stray weed.

“These are weeds,” he said as he pinched the plant between his fingers. “They can harm the other plants. You have to pull these out.”

“What makes them different from normal plants?”

“They have sharper edges on the leaves and they bundle together,” Ryouken gave the weed a hard pull and snapped off a leaf. “They compete for the soil. Be careful not to pull the actual plants out.”

“They look the same to me,” Yuusaku said.

“Remember three things,” Ryouken replied. As soon as he said that, Yuusaku’s hand twitched in response and Ryouken blinked, but brushed it off as nervousness. “Carrots spring up like forest trees and there are multiple stems from one carrot. Radishes are like carrots but they have bigger leaves. Tomatoes grow like vertical bushes and look like berries. Once you’ve learned what these three look like I can tell you about three more.”

Yuusaku reached out to tug at a large green leaf, and Ryouken immediately caught his wrist.

“That’s a tomato plant,” he said in exasperation. “Here. This is—”

He gripped the back of Yuusaku’s hand and moved it over to another stray weed, closer to Yuusaku’s side.

“This is a weed,” Ryouken said. “Go on and pull it out.”

Yuusaku’s hand twitched, and then he looked away.

“... You’re still holding my hand,” said Yuusaku, quietly.

Ryouken barely registered that sentence before he let go immediately, as if he had been shocked. He pulled his hand back into his chest and felt the heat rise in his cheeks. Ryouken had never been more glad that Yuusaku could not look at his face.

“Th-The weeds sprout once every few days,” he continued, pointedly looking in the opposite direction of Yuusaku. “Otherwise, there’s a watering can next to the pump. Just water the plants once a day and weed them if necessary. There’s…”

_It’s warm._

Ryouken stood up in a flash and (thankfully) Yuusaku’s face did not follow him.

“There’s something I need to do,” he said quickly. “I’ll see you.”

“Alright.”

Ryouken left the garden, the hand that gripped Yuusaku’s cradled gently against his chest. When he made it back into the house and slipped off his shoes, he flexed his fingers.

Snakes are cold, he had learned, but humans were warm. For a gorgon, that just meant a lower body temperature than humans (but not as cold as snakes). Ryouken had always been susceptible to cold weather and amicable in hot weather; it was just the nature of his blood.

As he curled his fingers inward and then released them again—

The heat had begun to spread to his wrist.

And just like that, it stayed.

 

 

Ryouken didn’t know when he had started to get used to waking up in the morning and making breakfast for two. The days and weeks after he found Yuusaku on the beach blurred together until Ryouken could only remember it somewhat distantly, like something that had happened a long time ago.

Yuusaku kept track of his days, though. At some point the increasing numbers he wrote down on his sheet of paper (provided by Ryouken) had just been another tick to add instead of something to keep him busy; the hope had long since left him. Ryouken watched him update the paper each morning while he made breakfast and Yuusaku sat with his back to him, so that they wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact.

Then Yuusaku would stash the paper into a cupboard and head outside so that he could tend to the garden.

Their days passed peacefully like this: Ryouken making breakfast while Yuusaku worked in the garden. In the afternoon, Yuusaku would read one of the many books that Kougami Kiyoshi left behind while Ryouken went down to the beach to visit his parents. At night, Ryouken would return to make dinner, and Yuusaku would be asleep, hunched over on the dining table with a book on his face.

And just like that, it became a routine.

“Yuusaku,” Ryouken shakes the body on the chair gently, grasping his shoulders. “Yuusaku. You’ve fallen asleep again.”

Yuusaku’s hand twitches, and then he groans. Ryouken watches as he rises from the table, groggy, but he is quick to remember that if Yuusaku moves any further the book will slide from his face. In his half-awake state, there is no way Yuusaku would register such a thing.

Ryouken holds his hand out and presses gently against the hardcover of the book. Yuusaku stills.

“Let me get dinner on the table first,” Ryouken says.

Yuusaku doesn’t respond but Ryouken knows he heard. He walks to the two meals waiting on the kitchen counter and picks them up. Yuusaku has moved from laying hunched over on the table to sitting upright, the book laying closed on the other end. His hands are covering his eyes in lieu of it.

Ryouken sets down their meals side by side. They cannot eat across from each other for fear of accidental glances, and eating alone in their rooms was… not preferred. Perhaps if Yuusaku were still new, and Ryouken had just found him on the beach, it would be expected. Those days, Yuusaku had eaten in his room, taken every meal behind closed doors, until he finally came out the day after Ryouken asked him to tend to the garden.

At least sitting side by side, they can still eat together.

There are a few candles on the table and around the room that Ryouken lights. The moon outside the window provides a little bit of light, but not enough that Yuusaku can see in the dark with. Ryouken has never had a problem—his eyes were perfectly fine in the dark, but humans didn’t have the same sight. His father, when he was home for those short stretches of time, was much the same.

“Okay, you can open your eyes now,” Ryouken says after he sits down next to Yuusaku. “I’m on your left.”

Ryouken picks up his fork and starts eating his meal. Yuusaku next to him takes a little bit to blink and get used to the brightness of the room, but he follows. Their meals are quiet, silent as everything else around them. Ryouken has never been one for small talk and Yuusaku never tried.

“Ryouken,” the sound of Yuusaku’s fork on his bowl stops. “What do you know about gorgons?”

Except today, evidently.

Ryouken put his fork down and frowned. “We turn people to stone if we look at them in the eyes,” he says, staring intently down at the bowl and not at Yuusaku. “And we are like snakes.”

Yuusaku doesn’t respond for a while.

“... Why?” asks Ryouken, hesitant. His fingernails tap against the ceramic of his bowl.

Yuusaku inhales.

“I have been thinking,” he starts slowly, and Ryouken can see Yuusaku’s elbow hit the table out of the corner of his eye. “That it must be lonely.”

Ryouken’s hand turns into a fist.

“It is just...” Yuusaku’s response is quick. “Because I have been here for so long, it made me wonder why you never go beyond the beach. I think I know why, though.”

“Because I’m half-gorgon, and everyone can see.”

“Because they’re scared,” Yuusaku says. “I used to be, too. Scared.”

“Used to be?” Ryouken blinks.

“I lived here long enough to draw my own conclusions,” Yuusaku says. “If I was scared of you, I wouldn’t have come out to eat with you.”

_Thinking he’s scared of you is irrelevant, because he’s still here._

Ryouken feels like his blood has stopped in its veins, and then picked back up again, renewed, all at once.

“It would be easier to talk with you if I was human,” Ryouken says after he’s composed himself.

“Or if I were gorgon,” Yuusaku replies. Then, quieter: “I read your father’s journals.”

“About curing gorgonism?”

“He talks like it’s a disease—”

“It is,” Ryouken can feel his teeth puncture the isnide of his cheek and tastes blood. He shakes his head to clear his mind. “It would be a lot easier if I weren’t half gorgon.”

Yuusaku falls silent. Ryouken cannot blame him; he would never truly know what it felt like, to watch his mother’s headless body roll off the cliff and into the ocean. To watch the villagers throw her head into a fire. To watch his father’s heart break as he came home and the only one left to greet him was his son, who couldn’t even look at him for fear of turning him to stone.

There is a warmth on his right hand and Ryouken blinks back to reality.

Yuusaku’s hand is wrapped around his.

“Can I?” Yuusaku asks, lowly, quietly.

Ryouken doesn’t know what he wants to do but he says yes anyway, feeling the way the heat curls in his wrist and spreads along his arm. Like that day in the garden, like the days afterward where Ryouken felt like he was burning whenever he went anywhere near Yuusaku.

“... Yes,” he says, again. “If you want.”

Yuusaku’s fingers trail along the back of his hand and his wrist, purposefully going over the patches of white scales that dot his skin. Ryouken only watches, transfixed, his heart in his throat as he feels fingers that aren’t his go over the scales. Yuusaku doesn’t say a thing; Ryouken doesn’t, either.

Yuusaku only stays within the range of his elbow to his hands, but Ryouken feels like he’s burning all over his body.

Human hands are so warm, he thinks. So soft, and unmarred by scales. Yuusaku’s palms feel like the sun at his back, shimmering over the rolling waves of the beach when Ryouken goes down the cliff to think about where his mother’s bones have drifted off to, how far his father’s body sunk. It is _so warm._

“They don’t cut me,” Yuusaku says, though his voice is so quiet that Ryouken strains to listen, afraid to break the silence like he is. “And they’re soft, like skin, almost.”

Ryouken resists the urge to grasp Yuusaku’s hand and take the heat for himself.

“Would you…” Ryouken starts to ask, though the words clump up in his throat like his heart does. He swallows to get rid of the feeling, but only feels butterflies pool at the pit of his stomach instead.

Inhale.

“Would you come with me outside?” he asks quickly, looking down at the table. He can’t see Yuusaku’s expression.

“Sure,” Yuusaku replies, a little confused.

Ryouken doesn’t think, just does.

He grabs Yuusaku’s hand and pulls him towards the door, Yuusaku letting out a short breath in surprise as he tries not to trip on the haphazard chair Ryouken left laying out in his wake. They don’t stop to put on their shoes at the door; Ryouken keeps walking outside even as he feels the grass and mud beneath his feet. If Yuusaku objects, he doesn’t say anything.

They walk, hand in hand, and keeping walking. And keep walking, until Ryouken stops at the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean and can see the moon shining over the water. When he was younger, his father said it was because of the things that lived inside the water that made it glow the way it did.

When he last saw it, he thought it was because his mother had returned to the waves.

Stardust Road.

Yuusaku lets out a breath beside him.

Ryouken sits down on the grass and Yuusaku follows him. Yuusaku’s hand remains in his, and Ryouken feels nothing but warmth between their joined fingers.

“When I’m sad,” Ryouken says, looking forward into the horizon. He wishes he could turn his head to look at Yuusaku instead. “I think of three things that make me happy.”

Yuusaku’s hand twitches in his grip.

“Oh,” Yuusaku says, like all the air has left him. He squeezes Ryouken’s hand tighter. “I see.”

“See what?”

“I have three things that make me happy too,” Yuusaku continues. “One, because the ocean looks beautiful like this, it makes me feel calm. Two, because you took me out here to see it. And three…”

“And three?” Ryouken prods, curious.

“I’m glad I was shipwrecked here,” Yuusaku finishes.

Ryouken feels something click within him, and then unleash, like a door had just opened. His heart beats quicker.

“I remember,” Ryouken says. Then, quicker, as the thoughts begin to fill up, as the memories come rushing back. “A long time ago, when I was a child—”

“I was half-dead at your doorstep.”

“... Thank you,” Ryouken says.

“I should be thanking you,” Yuusaku replies. “You saved my life.”

“Yes, but,” Ryouken smiles. “You saved mine.”

They watch the sunrise over Stardust Road.

 

 

There is a knock on Ryouken’s door.

Ryouken pauses as he stacks the dishware back into the cupboard. Yuusaku is usually out in the garden at this time of day, and doesn’t come back until later, when the sun begins to set. He knocks sometimes to let Ryouken know he is coming in, so he doesn’t reflexively turn around and look Yuusaku in the eye at the noise of his door being opened.

Perhaps Yuusaku had finished early today.

Ryouken opens the door and sees nothing, for a moment. He blinks, and wonders if he had just imagined the noise.

Then, a scream sounds.

“Gorgon!” a voice says, accusing, and Ryouken recoils back on reflex. When he turns his eyes downward he sees a child at his door, holding his hands over his eyes. “There _is_ a gorgon living here! I knew it!”

Ryouken’s blood runs cold.

The child turns his back to Ryouken then scampers off the hill like he had just seen a ghost. Ryouken stands there in the doorway, shell shocked, his skin growing paler by the second.

When he was a child, the other children would knock on his door as well to see if anyone lived here, but they always ran off before he could open his door. He had naively believed that they’d simply forgotten about him all these years in-between, but they were all getting to an age where they would have children now.

And they could tell those children about the hill, like it was some sort of scary story to put children to bed.

Yuusaku runs in from the edge of his vision and Ryouken immediately covers his eyes with his hands.

“I heard a scream,” Yuusaku says, out of breath. “I ran back here as fast I could. What happened?”

“We have to leave,” Ryouken says. He turns around and scrambles back into the house, grabbing a large back hung next to the door that they usually used to harvest vegetables.

Yuusaku’s footsteps follow behind him.

“What happened, Ryouken?” he asks, worried.

“We’ve been found out,” Ryouken says, the words rushing out of his mouth. He doesn’t know what to pack or grab, but finally settles on some clothes and a few harvested vegetables in the pantry. “ _I’ve_ been found out. They’re going to come.”

“Who is?”

“The humans,” Ryouken breathes. “The villagers.”

Yuusaku doesn’t ask more questions, just grabs a basket in the kitchen and loads a few foodstuffs into it. He grabs a few books from Kougami Kiyoshi’s bookshelf as well, and then covers it all with some spare clothes.

Ryouken waits for him by the door, anxious. Yuusaku puts his arms through the straps of the basket and then they leave the house, quick and silent.

“Do you have any idea where to go?” Yuusaku asks.

“Beneath the cliff there’s a cave,” Ryouken replies. He holds Yuusaku’s hand tightly as they descend onto the beach. “Some of the sea water flows into it. My mother used to live there.”

The sand gets into their sandals as they run across the beach, but neither of them can bother to care. Ryouken leads Yuusaku all the way to the rock of the cliff face, where his house rests on top. There are a few jagged rocks along the shoreline here, leading like lights to a cave mouth.

“Be careful,” Ryouken warns. “It’s slippery, and you could hit your head on the rocks.”

They make it inside without incident, but Ryouken keeps leading them further into the cave. The sound of the waves are amplified here, and the water creates white light on the rocks. The ocean soaks their shoes and the hem of their white robes.

Ryouken gestures for Yuusaku to sit down anyway. He does.

“We just have to wait it out here,” Ryouken says. “No one knows about this place.”

“And then?” Yuusaku asks, his voice resounding off the cave walls.

“And then…” Ryouken stops to think. “... and then...”

He doesn’t know.

“We could leave,” Yuusaku offers. “See the world.”

“But we don’t have a boat or a ship.”

Yuusaku falls silent. Then: “I could build one. I’m good with my hands.”

“A ship?” Ryouken asks incredulously.

“A _boat,_ ” Yuusaku stresses. “Just a small, rudimentary one. Enough to get us off the coast.”

Seeing the world with Yuusaku seems almost like a fantasy. Ryouken laughs before he can stop himself.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just… it sounds surreal. I’ve lived here my whole life.”

“There are a lot of places outside of this cliff,” Yuusaku says. “A lot of places I want to show you.”

Ryouken lets himself smile.

“Okay,” he says.

Yuusaku leans his head against Ryouken’s shoulder.

“Three things,” Yuusaku whispers.

“Three things,” Ryouken repeats.

They wait, surrounded by the ocean water.

 

 

They sit there, long into the night. The sun had set a long time ago and casted the whole cave into darkness. Ryouken’s eyes adjusted quickly, and he could see just as well as in sunlight as in the dark.

Yuusaku, however, merely tightened his grip on Ryouken’s hand.

Humans were much different, he remembers.

When the sky outside had begun to turn red again, Ryouken shook Yuusaku awake from his shoulder. Yuusaku groaned and sat up slowly, and Ryouken closed his eyes to prevent the urge to look at him.

“It’s almost dawn,” Ryouken says. “We should go before the morning wave comes in.”

Yuusaku yawns. “Yeah.”

Ryouken opens the bag he packed and takes out a few vegetables, some carrots and tomatoes. They eat quickly before they leave.

They go out the way they came in, tiptoeing carefully over the slippery rocks and catching ocean water in their clothes. When Ryouken sees the jagged shapes of the rocks outside the entrance to the cave and no one there to greet them, he exhales a sigh of relief.

The sand almost feels welcoming beneath their soaked feet and sandals.

“We can hide in the forest,” Ryouken says. “If they haven’t left our house alone.”

“Let’s be quick then,” Yuusaku replies.

“Oi! Who’s there?”

Ryouken and Yuusaku both freeze, and Ryouken’s blood runs like ice. He quickly pulls Yuusaku behind him before Yuusaku can even react.

There is a lit torch a little ways away from them, growing bigger as it comes closer. Ryouken is caught like a frozen deer as the light gets brighter.

_Then, they threw her body off the cliff and burned her head._

“Ryouken!” Yuusaku shouts at him, but Ryouken can hardly hear him anymore.

A man’s face comes into view and Ryouken does the first thing that comes to mind.

He looks him right in the eye.

The man has brown eyes like the wooden torch that burns in his hands, and Ryouken has never seen that before. His mother’s eyes were blue, and he could never check his father’s. He doesn’t know what color Yuusaku’s eyes are, either—he’s never seen them, and he’s never thought to ask.

Briefly, he wonders: _what color are Yuusaku’s eyes?_

The man screams as his legs begin to fail him and freeze into place. Ryouken snaps his eyes down to the sand, where he follows the beginnings of stone building over skin. It spreads over him like a swarm of bugs, reaching his knees, his abdomen, his neck, turning everything it touches into stone.

Soon, the man stops flailing.

Soon, the man stops yelling.

Soon, the man stops moving.

The statue before them is frozen in shock and terror and Ryouken only takes a moment to look at it before he’s doubled over and hacking his lungs out. It disgusts him, it repulses him, it—

“Ryouken,” Yuusaku says, his hands at his back.

Ryouken brings his hands up to his mouth and coughs up blood.

“Ryouken,” Yuusaku says again.

Ryouken heaves.

“I heard a scream this way!”

Ryouken takes no heed to his bloody hands and pushes Yuusaku faster along the beach. They leave the statue behind in the sand along with the rest of Ryouken’s blood. The image, though, the man’s face immortalized in stone—

_And no matter how far we run they would always come after us._

“Ryouken!” Yuusaku shouts.

Ryouken snaps his head up and halts as he sees the line of villagers in the direction they are running to. The ones behind them are growing closer, too.

His mother was right, Ryouken realizes too late.

Ryouken wipes the blood from his chin and scowls. “Yuusaku…”

“Ryouken, I’m…”

“No, I’m sorry,” Ryouken says.

Then he turns around to the encroaching villagers and runs his gaze through all of them.

Brown eyes, hazel eyes—Ryouken has never seen so many different faces and eye shapes before. Their faces twist from caution to horror, and each time he watches it, Ryouken wants to keel over and vomit. This is what a gorgon is, is it not? This is who his mother was, who _he_ is, now.

The row of humans before them turn into a row of statues. It’s like watching the sand rise from beneath their feet to cover all of them in a blanket of stone, like returning them to the earth and bedrock. If only it were that poetic, Ryouken thinks. His mind is running on a combination of fear, disgust, and ferality that would have made his gorgon half proud, had it had its own conscious. Ryouken is always…

Ryouken has always been a gorgon, and will always be one.

It is who he is.

There’s a shuffling noise behind him and Ryouken snaps around, eyes shining gold in the darkness like a snake. The sun is only beginning to rise on the horizon. At the end of dawn, it will all be over, Ryouken thinks. He and Yuusaku—

His eyes meet green.

Yuusaku’s eyes are green, like the plants that grow in the back of their garden, like the trees of the forest next to their house, like the grass that grows atop that hill that Ryouken has known his entire life.

The sound is Yuusaku’s robes on the shore as the morning wave comes up onto the beach. The sun provides a backdrop of light onto his skin, his hair, the lashes on his face. The brightness of his eyes.

Ryouken sucks in a breath.

“I’ve always wondered what your eyes look like,” says Yuusaku, quietly.

And it all comes crashing down.

“Yuusaku!” Ryouken stumbles forward, eyes wide, yet despite the dread in his stomach he cannot stop looking—cannot stop looking into Yuusaku’s eyes. Ryouken’s hands are shaking as they touch Yuusaku’s cheeks. “Yuusaku, no, I—”

The stone has begun making its way up Yuusaku’s legs and torso. The sea water creates a loud sound as it crashes into it and Ryouken cannot believe his eyes or his ears. His words choke in his throat.

“Ryouken, I love—” Yuusaku starts.

“—I love—” Ryouken begins, too.

The waves crash into the stone again and Ryouken feels his ears ring hollow, leaving behind only a high pitched noise that refuses to leave his ears. As the sun rises over the horizon, his fingers touch only polished stone and sculpted rock, chiseled by a fine mason and etched with a smile onto a human face.

Ryouken sees green.

_I love you._

There are no three things Ryouken can think of anymore, not when all of them have been sealed away into rock and covered in stone.

He is a gorgon, and that is all he ever will be.

The stone is cold when Ryouken presses his lips to it.

 

 

He buries Yuusaku in the sea like he had done for his father, like they had done for his mother.

Stone does not float above the waves and Ryouken knows it will sink, just like his father’s body had. So, he waits long nights and days at the beach in the aftermath, sitting alone next to a statue on an empty beach waiting, waiting—

When Stardust Road appeared again, he took the statue in his arms and walked into the ocean, as far as he could go. The stone felt heavy and weighty in his hands but Ryouken grit his teeth and kept walking, refusing to let go. The bioluminescent flora surrounded him with every step and clung onto his clothes, stuck to his robes like little glowing lights. In the brilliance of the water and the reflections, his scales glowed on his skin.

He remembers Yuusaku’s hands along it, touching the patches, careful and gentle, in awe. He remembers Yuusaku’s fingers on his skin, warm, warm, and warm all over. He remembers Yuusaku’s eyes, green like the faint tint of Stardust Road.

The ocean water is cold against his skin, makes him shiver, but Ryouken presses forward until the water has hit his neck.

He breathes in, out.

Stardust Road extends before him.

And Ryouken lets the statue—he lets Yuusaku go.

Yuusaku floats along Stardust Road like it were not the ocean or the sea, but a paved road along the beach. Ryouken watches him go further and further into the distance, further into the horizon. He stays there and watches it even further until it disappears completely from his view, a speck in the distance and then no more.

He stays there long afterward and lets the waves fill his lungs.

 _Yuusaku,_ he tries to say amidst the bubbles.

 

 

(The statue does not sink.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> please leave me a comment i'm begging you  
> also catch me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/octomaidly)


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